Latency of pro-saccades and anti-saccades in professional shooters

Purpose: This study evaluated hypothesis that the faster saccadic reaction time in professional clay-target shooters found in a previous study was because of a superiority of athletes arising at the attention level or at level of saccadic motor preparation. Method: Ten shooters with at least 6 yr of shooting training in Olympic shotgun disciplines and 10 control subjects participated in the experiments. In the first experiment, prosaccades were studied by comparing the saccadic latencies obtained from the overlap and gap paradigms. In the overlap paradigm, a target was presented randomly at one of four cardinal positions with the fixation point presented throughout the trial duration. In the gap paradigm, the fixation point was removed at the time of target presentation. In the second experiment, subjects were instructed to saccade as quickly as possible in the direction opposite to that of the target location (antisaccades). Results: Shooters had shorter saccadic latency than controls, both with gap and overlap conditions in the first experiment and in the antisaccade condition of the second experiment. Conclusion: This result indicates that athletes' advantage in saccadic reaction times cannot be attributed to improvement of the attentional mechanism of disengagement. Present results support the hypothesis that shooters develop shorter motor preparation to saccades.